How to Successfully Launch a New Book with ZERO Advertisers

You've finished writing weeks ago, maybe months. You've worked hard editing and finally have your new novel just the way you want it. You send it to your editor and after they rip it to shreds, you reassemble it and now it's perfect and ready for the world to see.

But how are they going to see it? If you just upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing, it could sit there for days, maybe weeks, before anyone sees it. You can tell your friends and family about it and you'll probably get a handful of sales, but still not enough to get it noticed by the public in general.

So how do you get that attention and get your work in front of a lot more people? There's really only two ways. Advertise it and spend a lot of money you might not have, or release it to your mailing list at a low price.

Mailing list? What mailing list?

If you don't have subscribers to your newsletter, you need to start now. Right now! Not tomorrow, or next week. It takes a long time to create a mailing list and usually it's just not possible without having written a book or two in the past with a call to action to join the newsletter.

With a mailing list of only 700 subscribers, I was able to launch my most recent book to #436 in the Kindle store, selling 260 copies in half a day after announcing it in my newsletter and another 150 the next day.

 

This simple secret, gave me instant high ranking, making my book visible to a lot more people. After the launch, you can see it leveled out to about 40 sales and 25 borrows per day. 

I started this mailing list in May of last year, so it's not even been a year yet. I send an email once a month, keeping my readers up to date on how the next book is coming along and occasionally asking their advice on a character name or something. 

So get started setting up your mailing list. NOW dammit!

Will KDP Select Countdown Deal Promos be coming to CA and AU?

Recently BookBub expanded their mailing list, or ratherm they separated their CA subscribers from the US list. I anticipate they'll do likewise with AU, with the UK and AU stores broken out.

Will Amazon follow suit and allow authors and publishers the ability to promote their KDP Select titles through a Countdown Deal in more than just the US and UK stores?

BookBub's reason for doing this seems clear. With just a single mailing list going to readers around the world, many are unable to take advantage of the deals, being restricted to buying only from their home country Amazon store. Better for public relations that they not know about the deals than be disappointed, or worse, clicking and finding the book they want for free is at full price in their countries store.

Recently, I contacted KDP and asked if they were going to offer Select promotional opportunities in other countries, particularly CA and AU. The response I received was full of the typical mumbo jumbo about being happy to assist me with my problem. But one line in the email caught my attention.

"Please note that we are unable to promise a certain time of release for this feature."

Would those of you who live in CA and AU be excited about being able to get free and discounted books? Would you authors in CA and AU take advantage of a new Select promotional tool?

Fallen King has Been Released!

Fallen King is the sixth book and the fifth full length novel in the Jesse McDermitt Caribbean action/adventure series. It went live on Amazon yesterday evening and has already reached a rank in the top 500 on Amazon. My newsletter subscribers were first to be able to read it and many have already finished and reviewed the book. It will be at the special release price of $.99 until 9 pm Eastern time on 2/15. After that, it will go up to $3.99.

This book, like the others in the series, takes place primarily in the Florida Keys. However, a good bit of the action takes place in the back country of southwest Florida and Florida Bay. This area is one of my favorite places in the world. From the small town of Flamingo at the southern tip of the Everglades, to the city of Naples eighty miles further up the west coast of Florida, this area is part of the Everglades National Park and rarely visited by anyone. Cape Sable has a fifteen mile long beach, with shallow water extending out into the Gulf of Mexico. Too shallow for almost any boat except kayaks and canoes and no roads to the area at all, you rarely see another person. North of there is the Ten Thousand Islands area, also part of the park, where canoe campers can travel the back water for eighty miles and never see a person. Even airplanes are a rare sight. It's very much like going back in time, to an age before the Indians arrived in North America. The sunsets there are spectacular.

I hope you'll enjoy reading this latest Jesse McDermitt thriller as much as I did writing it.